A man about to go on trial in Switzerland for breaking that country’s secrecy laws has promised to give details of 2,000 individuals and corporations who are hiding their money in offshore accounts to Wikileaks tomorrow.

The offshore bank account details of 2,000 “high net worth individuals” and corporations – detailing massive potential tax evasion – will be handed over to the WikiLeaks organisation in London tomorrow by the most important and boldest whistleblower in Swiss banking history, Rudolf Elmer, two days before he goes on trial in his native Switzerland.

British and American individuals and companies are among the offshore clients whose details will be contained on CDs presented to WikiLeaks at the Frontline Club in London. Those involved include, Elmer tells the Observer, “approximately 40 politicians”.

Elmer, who after his press conference will return to Switzerland from exile in Mauritius to face trial, is a former chief operating officer in the Cayman Islands and employee of the powerful Julius Baer bank, which accuses him of stealing the information.

That’s interesting enough. But I’m equally interested because of who Elmer’s lawyer is: Jack Blum. Blum explains why Elmer has resorted to leaking this to Wikileaks.

“My understanding is that my client’s attempts to get the banks to act over various complaints he made came to nothing internally,” says Elmer’s lawyer, Jack Blum, one of America’s leading experts in tracking offshore money. “Neither would the Swiss courts act on his complaints. That’s why he went to WikiLeaks.”

Calling Blum, “one of America’s leading experts in tracking offshore money” doesn’t convey the degree to which Blum’s investigations–perhaps most famously of BCCI–exposed the ties of the very powerful to corrupt money. After Blum’s Senate investigation of BCCI got too close to the Democratic fixer Clark Clifford, he was fired; he had to bring his work to NY’s DA and the press to reveal what he had found.

In a book review for HuffPo last year, Blum described how important it is to map the networks that run our world, yet noted that doing so has gotten more difficult since he first started investigating such things.

When I came to Washington 45 years ago to work as an investigator for the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, a senior investigator with years of experience told me that the beginning of any good investigation was a clear understanding of the players. “Everyone you will look at has a history,” he explained. “They will have mentors and sponsors. They will have networks of political and business connections. They will play many roles. If you understand those, everything else will fall into place.”

The advice was sound and has served me well in years of investigations of corporate wrongdoing, organized crime, money laundering, and securities fraud. My career highlights include serving as Special Counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and before that as Assistant Counsel to the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee followed by work as a private lawyer representing victims of financial crime and financial institutions on compliance matters.

Despite the desperate need for such an investigative approach, throughout my career I have been constantly perplexed by the reception to it. A frequent response by newspaper columnists and pundits was to dub me a “conspiracy nut.” Another common response was to call my evidence “anecdotal,” a word uttered with a dismissive sneer.

[snip]

The approach of looking to the roles, activities, sponsors, and networks of players–be they organized crime figures, politicians, experts, influencers, or some combination thereof–is today, more than ever, imperative. Profound changes in government and society have vastly increased the opportunities for agenda-bearing players wearing multiple hats (and often working in close-knit networks) to significantly influence public policy. Such activity is much less transparent to the public eye than when I first began my career. An amazing variety of corporate entities with strange and complex interrelationships today do much of the work of federal government, virtually substituting for it in some arenas. These entities and their sponsors are harder to identify, more insidious, and much more plentiful than the corporate fronts of yesteryear. [my emphasis]

It says something, I think, that the client of a guy who has gone to such lengths to expose the corrupt money running our world is going to Wikileaks.

54 Responses
to “Jack Blum’s Client Goes to Wikileaks”

I wonder if these heroes can save the world…literally.
Maybe not in dumbed down, freaked out America, but elsewhere where people mightily resist and are suspicious of their authorities/ governments.
The only thing protecting Assange right now is the information which will be leaked/dumped if anything “happens” to him.
He sure doens’t want the corrupt US government getting it’s hands on him.

GENEVA (AFP) – Bern has found signs that the US embassy in Geneva has been conducting illegal surveillance on Swiss territory, the justice ministry told AFP Sunday, confirming local press reports.

The Swiss government had in 2007 rejected requests made by the US missions in Bern and Geneva to protect their buildings through a surveillance programme “due to a lack of legal basis and bilateral accords on this domain,” the ministry said in a statement.

I’d like to see whisteblowers other than Wikileaks release some of this important material. If I was Assange, I’d give a lot of this kind of stuff to other sites like the newly-established Open Leaks, so as to make it harder for the media and the power elite that they serve to isolate Assange and assign singular blame to him. A lot of information coming from multiple sources would transform the political and legal dynamics of the Wikileaks issue.

Agreed, the more outlets we have for such information, the more likely it is that it will see the light of day.

That said, I am enormously thankful for the courage of Assange and all those who make Wikileaks possible. There have been too few avenues for whistleblowers, so I am happy that someone has taken a lead in giving them an opportunity to bring to our attention the vital information that they possess.

New information concerning how our economy is ‘managed’ & the ones owning and holding vast amounts of our money will,no doubt, go a long way to letting us know why some of the latest ‘happenings’ have been allowed to go on in our governance.

I’ve been astounded that Obama has gone to such lengths to save Wall Street and just let the middle class keep falling into poverty.

I wonder if anyone of them were friends with Bill Wheeler…You know, the guy with one black shoe, who supposedly tried to blow up his neighbors house, then went to another town and threw himself in a dumpster, while leaving his cell phone at the scene of the neighbor’s unblown-up house. BCCI? Bankers? Head of SEC in the 80′s? Just wonderin’.

So how long before this information hits the street? That it’s being handed over to Wikileaks doesn’t tell us whether and/or when it will be released. (Or did I miss that part?) And speaking of info dumps, what happened to the bank revelations that were suppose to drop just after the first of the year? I want to see some bank executives squirm…

This ought also to buttress WikiLeaks’ position that it is a publisher, like the New York Times, not a secret agent. Pity the Times has erased its own history of publishing unwanted government news and instead made its bed with the government.

The names on the CDs will not be made public, just as a much shorter list of 15 clients that Elmer handed to WikiLeaks in 2008 has remained hitherto undisclosed by the organisation headed by Julian Assange,

Why? I readily admit to being obtuse, but what good is the data dump if the information is not made public?

I’m visualizing a cartoon with Obama and Holder getting into awkward positions desperately trying to stuff their fingers, toes, and clothes into holes that are springing leaks in a giant wall holding back a sea of criminal government and corporate misconduct.

The Manning files could have gone to any number of targets. Not just Wikileaks. What has reached the public is minimal.

Why not release 20 cables a week ?

Why not release 10 Afghanistan log messages a week ?

BTW: Assange claims that he owns the files and has an economic interest in controlling releases. Well, stolen materials are never owned by receivers. The materials in these files cannot possibly be a legal asset of Mr. Assange or Wikileaks.

Rudolph Elmer would do better to hand over his material to The Guardian.

I fervently hope they have already emailed or FTPed the files to Wikileaks, and this is just a publicity stunt. Physically transferring the CDs seems like a lame move, even assuming they are backed up here and there.

Same thought here; why not just FTP the files? Maybe the private security ops have made it too tough to FTP to Wikileaks these days? Just a guess.

The approach of looking to the roles, activities, sponsors, and networks of players–be they organized crime figures, politicians, experts, influencers, or some combination thereof–is today, more than ever, imperative. Profound changes in government and society have vastly increased the opportunities for agenda-bearing players wearing multiple hats (and often working in close-knit networks) to significantly influence public policy.

There is a site that tracks others (not comprehensive, but substantial): National Whistleblowers Center. Worth keeping mindful just how widespread the keeping of secrets remains, not to mention seemingly standard Fed (and international gov) procedures to send loud & clear message to “whistleblowers”.

In larger picture, also (at least for me) brings to mind BushCo’s early post 9/11 edicts banning whistleblower protections… it was one (of many) such events that sent shivers down the spine, shivers which proved to be prescient.

I’d also remind that BushCo’s creation of Homeland Security… the “biggest reorganization of intelligence services since WW II” as he called it, was nothing more then a massive smokescreen put out to redirect what, at the time, was growing momentum to challenge Bush’s public rationale for Iraq adventure. There was whole shitload of folks similarly silenced when coming forward to challenge that “endeavor”.

Further, the people Junior put in charge (eg: Negraponte et’al) were core to the group responsible for conjuring up the whole Iraq fraud in the first place.

Really, in larger context, at least to me… all this is testament to utter, complete aversion to the truth by those charged with running things here. We are paying the price.

I mean, really… we’re having national discussion about cutting gov expenditures for services, with influence on this election driven by getting “spending” under control. Yet, the people elected largely ran the coverup for massive, massive spending in Iraq/Afghanistan left off Bush’s books. And then all the secret subcontractors rewarded by BushCo, adding nothing to any worthwhile outcome.

Bernard (M of A) had good post up a couple days ago: The Liberation Of Afghan Villages. Essentially, we’re still doing what Rummy did in early Iraq… eg. fire bomb Falujah (twice), destroy whole towns (especially in north) to weed out a few (more often freedom fighers then terrorists), not to mention Israel’s longstanding policy of doing the same in “territories” while never being held accountable.

I’ve seen whole swath of #s for accounting of this cost, but at minimum we’ve dumped $1.5T into this effort. Why is this not part of the US finance (what we do w/gov spending) discussion?

It’s no secret why we’re in the mess we’re in, nor the cause. There’s pretty much a blow by blow timeline documenting the whole slide, yet every step along the way we’ve been told lies, and one after the other to obscure each succeeding deception. It’s really quite incredible.